Kelvin Gastelum: The Welterweight Middleweight

Kelvin Gastelum’s success at middleweight has come through driving a high pace and through straight hitting. In some respects that might make him a very good man to test Israel Adesanya. Adesanya has had his best success when his opponent is a little wary of him, and this allows Adesanya to wreak havoc with feints and misdirections while pounding their head, body and legs with long kicks. Gastelum’s short stature in the middleweight division may have prepared him for this fight because in most of his bouts at middleweight he cannot afford to be stuck on the outside and he might bring a kind of urgency to press in close that many of Adesanya’s opponents lacked.

Of course there is urgency to pressure and there is running in blindly as Derek Brunson tends to do, and Brunson got chinned with a knee as soon as Adesanya broke away long enough to get his timing. Standing on the outside and offering no threat is a great way to get pieced up and worn down at distance, but reckless aggression gives counter strikers like Adesanya a hitting power that they cannot produce if you’re standing still out at distance.

But there are two ways to skin the cat of the powerful, rangey kicker. The first is to keep pressing forward and to step up the middle with straight punches whenever he stops to kick. The second is to hang around on the end of his range—even if yours is considerably shorter—convince him to overcommit in reaching for you, and then leap in and crack him before he can retreat. While the range difference between Gastelum’s straight punches and Adesanya’s body kicks is substantial, Gastelum does good work coming out of a bounce—the old slide away and return could be a good shout if he can make Adesanya a little impatient.

Though bouncing in on a thoroughly washed up Johny Hendricks and Vitor Belfort is not quite the same thing as catching Israel Adesanya cold.

This is also, of course, a good tactic to switch to mid-fight if you’re having trouble. T.J. Dillashaw couldn’t get a glove on Dominick Cruz for much of their fight, yet the moment Dillashaw stopped chasing and took a step backwards, Cruz automatically stepped in and Dillashaw was able to land his best punches of the fight.

A £10 on Gastelum to beat Adesanya returns £25 

Israel Adesanya: The Style Bender

Everything about this stylistic match up on paper says Gastelum should be wrestling and Israel Adesanya should be expecting it. But part of the intrigue here is that for so much of Gastelum’s recent career we have seen him play the part of the anti-wrestler. His job against big middleweight grapplers like Tim Kennedy, Chris Weidman and Ronaldo ‘Jacare’ Souza has been to keep them working and to keep scrambling up. Gastelum hasn’t really pushed a grappling heavy gameplan in a few years, and the last time most will remember was against Uriah Hall—another big, flashy middleweight striker but a guy with none of the ring awareness or caution of Adesanya.

For Adesanya the plan should probably be to move and use the space. He is the longer man, and he stops a takedown well, but he probably doesn’t want to get caught up in long stalemates along the fence instead of doing what he loves to do—kicking the body and jabbing the face. Keep an eye on how Adesanya uses his rear hand after throwing it, he will often use it to frame off his opponent and step out to the side into the opposite stance and come back punching.

Another neat trick of Adesanya’s is to hang out a jab or a shoulder feint like bate and then pull back on a slight angle. He will retreat on forty-five degree lines to draw the opponent into overextending and this is where he scores a lot of counter hooks and straights. Where pulling back right in front of the opponent is dangerous because they can keep coming in, angling off as you do it and encouraging them to keep stepping will often leave them more open than you.

Here’s a nice shoulder feint into a retreat on an angle. Adesanya leaves the line of attack every time he retreats and in MMA that is a very rare level of striking discipline. Notice how Tavares has to leap forward on an angle and out of the safety of his stance.

And this is perhaps why Adesanya’s striking has adapted to MMA so well—he doesn’t really do much covering up, he’s pretty handsy and pushes and pulls his opponents a lot in exchanges, and he thrives on opponents who attack on straight lines.

It might work to Gastelum’s advantage that this is a five round fight, where failed takedown attempts and grinding wall work might slow Adesanya down for the later rounds. It would be encouraging if Gastelum weren’t such a head hunter and had shown some solid commitment to body shots through his career—straight lefts to the chest and solar plexus could be a real investment for him against Adesanya and would also make him less likely to fall into those easy traps of swinging for Adesanya’s head when it just isn’t quite within reach. But you can never underestimate the consistent use of punching flurries into level changes along the fence—they aren’t pretty but they do consistently change the direction of rounds.

With the winner of this fight getting a shot at the brilliant but injury prone Robert Whittaker, the middleweight division continues to provide fascinating match ups in spite of cancellations.